


Dismantle

by Magichorse



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, One Year Later, POV Carlos, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2818334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magichorse/pseuds/Magichorse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos tries to break Night Vale into understable components and Night Vale breaks down Carlos instead. Short fic pre- and including One Year Later from Carlos's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dismantle

**Author's Note:**

> I think we all have our theories about what Carlos's life looked like up until One Year Later, and this mine, in a very bare bones way.

Carlos Mejia placed his fingertips gently on the desert ground. The hot air around him was still, and, except for the grind of pebbled earth beneath his boots as he crouched beside the seismometer in the sand wastes, silent. After a calculated length of time he slid his hand flat and pressed his palm to the burning sand and waited once more. Nothing.

He heaved himself back upright and clapped the dirt from his palms, eyeing the instrument that had drawn him out there warily. The readout scrolling across its screen indicated that an earthquake of magnitude 5.1—harmless but absolutely noticeable in size—was happening at this very moment. 

He turned in a slow circle, squinting beneath the brim of his hat at the low hills and scrub brush. Nothing. He exhaled loud and slow, wondered if the seismometer wasn’t picking up his blood pressure instead, and sank down once more beside it. From the pocket of his pristine lab coat he produced a small screwdriver.

In the silence of the sand wastes the scientist carefully took apart the seismometer, laying its complex components in impeccable, gleaming rows. In a couple hours time, his exacting task complete, he wiped a hand across his brow and proceeded to put it precisely back together again. He reconnected the current. The needle jumped back to life. An earthquake of magnitude 5.9 was now reportedly in progress. 

As the sun continued to burn across the desolate wastes from a cloudless sky, Carlos felt a chill slide down his spine.

*

Carlos’s home office was filled with a sort of low, frenetic ticking like a thousand insects in flight. Every available surface was covered with gathered time pieces. Digital clocks beeped and mantel clocks chimed and scores of wristwatches contributed their individual voices to the din. On the floor was a sprawling map of Night Vale with large red squares drawn across it to denote possible locations of the famed clock tower.

With only the slightest bit of trepidation Carlos produced a small screw driver from his pocket and began to dismantle the clocks one at a time. He opened each carefully, dread growing as the number of clocks awaiting their turn dwindled, and pressed on until the room was silent and glittering with a mess of tiny springs and cogs and…something unmentionable. 

With clammy hands and sweaty fingers he reached for his phone, dialed, waited.

“Cecil, I need to talk to you, this is important…”

*

They met approximately mid-morning at the Moonlite All-Nite. Carlos shook the radio host’s hand formally like he always did. He seated himself on the high stool beside him, brushed past the usual pleasantries, ignored the compliments on his physique and launched into the severity of the topic at hand.

He told Cecil that the sunrise and sunset were determined by the laws of astrophysics and that something was going wrong around here. He described to Cecil the tilt of the earth in space. He explained the concepts of solstice and equinox in minute detail, elaborated on the mechanisms that produced the cycle of earth’s seasons and the meaning of a single shift in the narrow conditions sustaining life on the planet. By the time he finished speaking his mouth was dry, his hands trembled and the back of his paper place mat was a confusion of hasty lines and diagrams scribbled by an illegal pen. He took a deep breath and looked into the other man’s face expectantly.

Cecil sipped a second cup of coffee (Carlos’s first sat cold and untouched) and regarded him silently for some time with eyes the unusual color of a desert sunset. He felt uncomfortably that he was being dismantled by that gaze and his most intimate parts examined. The way he was these days, there must be more than enough cracks to pry open, enough weaknesses at his junctures to exploit. 

“I see how this must be hard for you,” was all Cecil said at last, but Carlos felt that deep voice reach into his chest and still the tremors in his hands. He recoiled from the gentle feeling as if burned. He knew the touch of something unnatural when he felt it. 

He stood abruptly and asked once more that Cecil spread the news on his radio show and implored him to put it to the attention of the mayor and police. He snatched his hat from where he’d tossed it on the diner counter and left in a swirl of lab coat.

*

The first thing he noticed in the void was his heartbeat, loud and slow and reverberating in the darkness. 

He was a heartbeat...Beat… Beat. Beat. Beat.

And slowly, seeping in at the edges of his consciousness, he became aware of a voice as well, forlorn and ethereal. The weight of the emotion it carried settled heavily upon him. His heart startled at the pain of that touch, became blood rushing in a human body and the voice dissipated into the background noise of some busy locale. The pain that filled his chest with sadness expanded and split and became the burn of pain receptors in a human leg as well. He became lungs, inhaling sharply and eyes stabbed by light.

He coalesced into Carlos Mejia on the floor of the Desert Flower. Around him, people he barely knew fussed and fretted.

“You’re okay, son,” said Teddy Williams, peering over him, “You were attacked by the miniature city but I’ve got you bandaged up right enough. Now, don’t—say, now! Take it easy! Where do you think you’re going?”

He pushed his way out of the bowling alley and into the cool evening air. He tried to breathe it in to calm himself but his heart was still loud in his ears and that pain! Not in his corporeal extremities but all through his chest. He felt scattered, out of focus, fragmental. It made no scientific sense but he knew what to do. It had nearly become a habit in the past few months. He reached for his phone, dialed, waited.

“Cecil, it’s Carlos…can you meet me in the Arby’s parking lot?”

*

It was not a far walk to where he’d parked his car across from the Desert Flower at the Arby’s. With some difficulty he maneuvered onto the hood and propped himself up as best he could against the windshield to wait. He watched the lights dance above the neon sign.

Not much time passed before a pair of headlights cut out beside him and a man who was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, appeared and took in the sight of him sitting there, alive and mostly whole. For a moment they simply regarded one another in silence, and Carlos felt the ache in his chest begin to recede.

He looked at Cecil in the twilight, at the way his skin complemented the desert sand and his eyes reflected the lights slowly blinking in and out of sight above the Arby’s. The man was inhuman, surely, but undeniably beautiful, too, and somehow beneath the lights and the void in a timeless space in an unchartable desert, Cecil Palmer made sense. The clocks made sense. The benignly toxic atmosphere made sense. The earthquakes…perhaps there was a sense to them, too. 

“How can I be of assistance?” Cecil asked earnestly.

“After everything that happened…I just wanted to see you,” said Carlos softly.

“…Me?” Cecil's voice pitched up uncharacteristically in disbelief.

Carlos let out a breathy laugh, the first, he was certain, in an entire year. 

“Yes, just…come here. Please.”

Cecil climbed gracefully onto the hood of the car and sat close to Carlos, and Carlos placed a hand on the other man’s knee. The cold feeling in his chest turned warm and his senses settled back into place. He felt whole and calm and so, so tired.

Cecil laid his head on Carlos’s shoulder, and Carlos rested his head against that mess of dark hair and thought about how it smelled like desert sagebrush. They watched the lights together and Carlos understood so much. Not the void—the void stretched beyond comprehension, but here, Night Vale, the pieces were fitting together at last.

**Author's Note:**

> It's amazing how much time goes into producing something even so small as this. Simplistic as it is, I hope you all enjoyed it. I feel as if any contribution I can give to the fandom in exchange for the amount I consume is worthwhile!
> 
> When I write I keep a graveyard page of things I had to remove from the body of the work but want to keep either because I like them or because I hope they'll find a home in another story. This line of Cecil's didn't make the cut, but I like it. From the graveyard:
> 
> “My dear Carlos, you mean to tell me that our situation as inhabitants on a piece of rock hurtling through space in thrall of a burning orb is precarious at best and terrifying at worst?”
> 
> Over and out!


End file.
